YouSaid · the spoken record

Paul Nurse

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69
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2023-07-24
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2023-07-24
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  1. “You know, all good things. We now help them a lot with life sciences education, but it was complicated. But Gordon did give us a site at half price, still 75 million, and that kicked it off. Then it went into the next government, okay, and there was a bit of a tussle at the beginning because it was a project that could be cancelled because it was a capital project.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “So this was the first idea. And of course, it got nowhere because it was stupid, it wasn't built for that. And anyway, none of them. Then I was working in America and a colleague of mine, Keith Peters, got hold of me and said, you know, about this sort of merger, there might be a site here from the British Library. I didn't know about that. And I thought, well, this is interesting. And I had a conversation with Gordon Brown, which kicked this thing off. And Gordon Brown helped us by getting us this site. I've got to admit it was a bit of a struggle because Camden, for good reasons, were in Camden. Wanted the site, put a shopping mall up, I think, pay for primary schools. You can't.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “And I focus on hiring the best people from around the world. And we get 400 or 500 applications for every job group leader position that we advertise, completely better than anything we could do in the US. The origins of it, I had the first idea for it around 2000. The first idea was I wanted to put it in the Millennium Dome because nobody had any idea. It was a really stupid rubbish.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Well, there's 1,500 scientists working in here. They are bringing with them across the whole spectrum of the life sciences. It's the biggest institute in Europe under a single roof of this sort, for sure. And what we put together was similar institutes, one in Lincoln's Inn, one in Mill Hill, another one in South Mims, actually, to make this big institute, which meant we could be interdisciplinary. I had no departments or divisions. It's a bit anarchic, in fact.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “As drives me, but we would have a discovery institute, but we would capture things that would be good for society, but not try and direct them. And that's a very powerful way of working which we can explore.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Yes, I've always been a researcher. I still have PhD students, and that is central to my working life. And I spend about half my time following my own curiosity. It's a privilege to be able to do that. I mean, a real privilege. But it turned out that I was quite good at running things and quite good at setting things up. And I sort of felt in my sort of strange brain that if I could do that, then it would be like a payback which would allow me to just pursue my curiosity. It may sound a bit odd, but I do see just following your curiosity as a privilege. And I paid it back by doing things like Francis Crick Institute. This institute came about because I was running a smaller institute of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund and I had the idea of merging three institutes to make this big institute where people could follow curiosity, the same thing as...”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “The one at the bottom of the hill I like to say rather than the top of the hill. And that score had a very good biology teeter who worked on badgers. And Keith just died actually a couple of months ago, sadly. And he was in his 20s, he was fantastic. I got really interested in just how living things worked. And he just kept going. And what it meant was as exams got less and less important as you go on, I got better and better.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “The boys that can do maths do physics, and the boys who can draw do biology because we just had to draw things under the microscope. Actually, I wasn't very good at either, but anyway, I ended up doing biology. And the reason was I thought, you know, physics, and one of my daughters is a physicist actually. Physics is got such big ideas. How could I ever contribute to it? Biology's got lots of little ideas mostly with occasional fantastic ideas like Darwin and so on. And I thought I could contribute something to that, whereas physics is just too big, if you see what I mean. And so I gradually moved into biology. I wasn't too good at exams. I found it difficult to get into fact I was rejected by every university. I went to and I worked as a technician in the Guinness Brewery in Park Royal, in fact. But eventually I got in, University of Birmingham. And as I was longer in, if you like, academia, I got...”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Start with just why I ended up there. Because I was the youngest child of my family, it was almost like being an only child, despite having brothers and sisters, they were much older than me. I had a long walk to school and I got just interested in natural history and I just looked at the flowers, the birds coming, walking back in the evening, the stars coming. I looked at planets. I got a little telescope. I looked at rings of Saturn and things of this sort. Really, I had, I suppose, just a natural curiosity about the world works. It was a deep curiosity. Like Alistair, I was actually interested in words and I wasn't quite sure whether to go down a humanities route or a science route. In the end, I went for science and I went for biology over physics, for example, the physical sciences. At the time, they used to say, I went to a boys school. They used to say”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “70s. So look at these two major transformations. For 50 years, I think I get my parents wrong. And then 20 years after that, I discover who my father was.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Well, until a few weeks ago, I had no idea who my father was. I now got a lead, and it's not yet sure, so I'm not going to talk about it here, but I suspect in the next couple of months to know who my father was.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Right, well we'll come to that in a moment. I just wanted to say what happened was, as I discovered later, was my mother got pregnant at 17. She was sent to her aunt in Norwich, we lived in London, as I said, and my grandmother came back with me pretending to be my mother. They were protecting her, of course, for the reasons you've said, and they provided me with a good home. I mean, everybody was doing their best for me. I mean, it wouldn't happen now. Nobody would understand it now.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “My grandparents on that side came from Norfolk. They themselves were illegitimate too, and I don't know their fathers. I mean, I barely have a male progenitor in my entire line. But we're talking the 20s now. They worked in the big houses, quite often happened to illegitimate children, and they met there. And so I knew I didn't have much background.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Miriam, her name, sister, I used to sometimes say to my friends because they were a bit older. I used to say it's like being brought up by my grandparents. But I was being brought”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “They did not, and I think the reason was ultimately was that my mother married somebody else when I was about two and a half. And there's a very touching photograph, by the way, of she getting married holding my hand with one hand and a new husband with the other hand because she was about to lead me with her parents to go and start a new life.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “What they wanted was a proper birth certificate. What I had was a so-called short birth certificate, which doesn't name your parents. It was actually invented in the Second World War just after it because of the problem of legitimacy. You've just been describing. I asked my parent, who were my grandparents, why I had a short birth certificate. And they said, because it was cheaper than the bigger one.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Nobel Prize as President of University in the US, and I was knighted. I'd rather actually admired them for turning me down, perfectly honest.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Well, I come from a working class family, was brought up in Wembley, northwest London, where a football stadium is. We lived in a two-bedroom flat. There were seven of us and quite crowded and so on, very happy and so on, but it was not exactly luxurious. And I had two brothers and a sister. I was the only one who stayed at school after 15, and I became a geneticist. So I used to think about why was I different from my brothers and sisters, but I never dreamt for one moment what actually the truth was what Alistair has just described until I was applying for a green card in America. And I was turned down. The only person I actually know of who has ever been turned down for a green card. I mean, I know people are, but I mean, in academic circles, it's usually straightforward. At the time, I had a”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Well, I got it mainly because I was very lucky it has to be said. Not modest actually as many scientists who deserve the Nobel Prize. But what it was for, and I did it, I got it with two other colleagues, what it was for was for working out the mechanism by which the division of a cell undergoes a division from one to two. Now we're all made of cells, billions of cells. We all came from a single cell, so it should be of interest to everybody, both you and everybody listening to this. The control of a division of that cell from one to two is fundamental to the growth of all living things, all reproduction, and goes wrong in cancer. And what we did with worked out the mechanisms by which that's controlled.”

    2023-07-24 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 28: Paul Nurse: The power of genetics, battling politicians, and the fight against cancer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source